Can fantasies ever become real?

“The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist,” said Hemingway, and in this reflects the nature of all dreamlike activity. The meaning that exists in a daydream dwindles and collapses once brought to reality. They are two planes that cannot be literally translated one to another, yet transforming former into latter can and eventually must happen if you are to be free from its grip. But it comes with a twist. Turning fantasy into reality means understanding it. If fantasy is an indirect expression of unconscious activity, understanding where it came from, where it points to, what it tries to embody and compensate for equals translating it to the language of waking consciousness.

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“The same feeling of not belonging, of futility, wherever I go: I pretend interest in what matters nothing to me, I bestir myself mechanically or out of charity, without ever being caught up, without ever being somewhere. What attracts me is elsewhere, and I don’t know what that elsewhere is.” – E. M. Cioran

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Fantasies are projections, emotional content that got cut off from ego, from conscious experience of oneself, and taken to exist elsewhere as a separate entity, forgetting its relation to its source with whom it could no longer coexist. For instance, if you suffer from low self-esteem, emotions that require healthy levels of self-esteem to be expressed in the first place, such as self-acceptance or love, will not be able to be experienced consciously and spontaneously as an integral part of ego due to an internal conflict, and will consequently separate from you and manifest externally as fantasies that indirectly arouse these feelings in you through your stories and characters. It’s a shift of perspective; emotions originally supposed to be felt by you are now experienced by your characters, which, by being cast outside yourself, gain a certain degree of autonomy. It’s like having a second sense of self outside yourself, but this second self is never conscious and thus never fully capable of sustaining life on both sides. You may feed it with all kinds of fancy emotions, but you will always remain hungry and craving because the other half starves.

Carl Jung, whose entire psychoanalytic research was dedicated to studying workings of fantasy, wrote that to overcome and dissolve fantasies is to restore their contents to the individual who has involuntarily lost them by projecting them outside himself. They disappear spontaneously when what was projected outside of ego returns to ego.

But what does it mean to restore their contents? Please note that we are talking here about restoring emotional content of fantasies, not literal one.

When particular feeling, which you failed to experience yourself, separates from you and manifests through fantasy, what used to be a subject – that is, a part of you – now seemingly becomes an object, something distinct from you, something existing elsewhere. By starting to perceive the content of your fantasies as objects, you start to perceive them as something to be physically acquired, literally possessed or acted out in real life in order to stop craving.

But this doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because fantasy isn’t an object – it’s that second sense of self, a subject. To reclaim an object means to possess it physically, but to reclaim a subject means retrieve the emotions trapped within daydreams, to relearn how to experience them. Dissolving fantasy and reintegrating it into the self from which it separated means to release emotions that underlie it, not to possess its contents literally.

You can’t have a literal company of your imaginary companion and maybe you can’t have a PhD in nuclear physics you fantasize about, and no, you cannot undo your abusive childhood if you had one. Instead, you must identify what sort of emotions these scenarios awake in you. What emotions in particular are you coming in touch with when having an episode of MD? Is it a sense of belonging? Emotional intimacy? Is it attention? Can you experience these emotions in normal waking life when surrounded by others? If no, why not? What prevents you? Identify what traits are missing from your conscious self that are needed for you to be able to experience these emotions. If you fantasize obsessively about love, it probably doesn’t mean that you don’t have love in real life and are doing it because you are lonely – what it means it that a part of you needed to experience love in the first place went dormant. If you can daydream about romance only in third-person without involving yourself, what emotional receptor, what aspect of yourself did you lose so that you can no longer experience romance on your own skin? What part of yourself went dormant so that emotions processed by it had to dissociate? Why did it go dormant?

Analyze your fantasies. Write things down and find connections. There’s an unexpected amount of unconscious logic directing the inner theater.

The crucial thing to understand is that the allure of MD stems from identifying emotions experienced in a daydream with a particular scenario or a character. Instead of realizing that cravings are born from and governed by an emotion you want to experience (i.e. confidence, a sense of belonging), you end up thinking you are infatuated with a character that is merely a metaphorical container and a bringer of that emotion in you. This results in misplaced attachments, misplaced attachments result in hunger that can never be put out because you mistake the message for the messenger.

I know that for some of us imaginary companions feel too dear, too real to be left behind and disacknowledged – and if overcoming MD meant reducing them to a mere defense mechanism, I would be the last person propagating it. The only way to overcome them, without giving them up, without stripping them of importance, of zeal and fire they elicited in us, is to learn from them. They are personifications, messengers of emotions, and to dissolve them without robbing them of their meaningfulness, is to hear the message they carry. When emotional content projected onto fantasy is made conscious and reintegrated into the ego, the message is heard and the messenger, having carried out his purpose, dissolves.

In this way, overcome fantasies and inner companions don’t become lost or dispersed into thin air; instead, they are returned to you, reintegrated into conscious self, into the place where they originally came from, and you are no longer hungry to search for yourself outside yourself – in projections and dreams.

Addiction, cravings and MD: what they are and where they come from

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Put simply, MD is a problem of expression. Psychological addiction is a problem of expression. What is not expressed as raw feelings becomes distorted and expressed as cravings. Addiction is a compensation born out of powerlessness to directly express what one wants or feels. If there is a particular desire in the unconscious layers of the mind that screams to be released but that somehow does not make it to the surface where it can be consciously articulated, it turns into a craving. What we see as insatiable hunger for fantasy on the surface is just trails of smoke of a raging, intelligible fire burning somewhere below. If you want to communicate something important but have no mouth to speak or express it otherwise in a direct, conscious way, this burning need to communicate will refract once its hits the surface of conscious awareness and turn into a craving. The moment you learn to express it consciously, the craving disappears.

Cravings on the surface appear to be automatic, purely instinctual, yet when you dig in a bit deeper, they are driven by an actual logic and are more than just a chemically messed up mechanical response in the brain. They arise when you cannot communicate a particular emotion through your ego. Your unexpressed anger or desire to speak up or express something you consider important is what creates the urge to engage in addictive behavior. Instead of expressing feelings as they really are, this energy is misdirected, misinterpreted and becomes a craving.

It is not normal for human mind to live in an emotional isolation, without being able to receive positive input from real life as if we had a veil over the eyes preventing us to register whatever comes from the outer world. When the brain is caught in isolation, in a state where it cannot communicate with external reality, it will create its own. We know from neuroscience that when brain receives no sensory stimuli from real world, it automatically starts conjuring up internal visual images and hallucinations to compensate for that silence and this is a natural, automatic response everyone experiences when deprived of external sensory input. Brain needs constant input, inner or outer. If you isolate a person in one of those anechoic chambers that block all outside noise and create an absolute silence, the person eventually starts hearing sounds of their own body otherwise not hearable because brain, unless you are doing advanced meditation, cannot stay in perfect silence. When the outer world is silenced, the inner world goes wild.

Isn’t the similar mechanism at work when dealing with lack of emotional stimulation? If you dig deeper in the neuroscience of extreme physical and social isolation, it is not uncommon to find reports of mentally healthy people who sense a comforting imaginary presence, almost like an inner companion when put in extreme isolation. An actual hallucinogenic, soothing presence to compensate for the unbearable silence of the world. This is not a psychosis, this is merely the brain keeping the mind sane. When the outer world is silenced, the inner world goes wild.

Severe MD is triggered when one becomes emotionally isolated and estranged from parts of oneself, automatically leading the person to become estranged from everything normally perceived through that blocked part of the self, including reality. There are things happening in real life but they don’t reach us. Fantasy appears as a response to that emotional isolation, to give one emotional feedback from the inside that outer world fails to provide from the outside. It is the same feedback loop at work: when the outer world is silenced, the inner world goes wild. Have you ever thought how ridiculously cut off and alienated from real world one has to feel to subconsciously start inventing imaginary relationships when real people are all around? There is obviously no sensory deprivation going on here that would explain the prevalence of inner world over external one, which can make us conclude that intense MD can really only be a consequence of an emotional isolation.

I strongly believe that both MD as an addiction and losing responsiveness to reality are merely symptoms of the emotional isolation. But what brought on the isolation in the first place?

Carl Jung wrote: “Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.” And indeed, if one cannot communicate the pivotal values of his inner self necessary for healthy emotional functioning, if one can’t have them flow into the outer world, the inner world turns into a prison from which you are allowed to leave but your emotions are not. The external world in turn appears hollow and hostile. You can visit it, but stripped of emotions you left in the inner world. Then you make a common mistake: you mistake reality for hollow when it is you who is an empty shell with feelings detached and left forgotten in some other place.

If this is indeed the case, recovery should be focused on breaking down that emotional isolation by identifying and then relearning how to directly express those vague feelings you express indirectly through fantasy. It is hunger for these feelings that fuels fantasies and prompts the addictive cravings. It is obsession with these feelings that prevents you to focus on reality. This is why one unconsciously calls forth MD in the first place – to provide a temporary and indirect touch with detached feelings that one is having difficulty expressing consciously.

If it could be said in one sentence why MD happens, it is because you are holding yourself back. For a daydreamer whose automatic response is to repress and keep all ruminations turned inward, trying to express feelings directly, which are often bewildering even to us, can seem like a shock to our entire being, awkward and strange, initially resulting in more confusion than clarity. You force yourself to express something and then feel silly and embarrassed for days to come. It’s a messy and ridiculously baffling process. Even depressing. But it is the necessary price for restoring a healthy emotional expression.

Let go of having to be in control of your feelings, let go of thinking everything over and most importantly, let go of holding back and try to release emotions. Hunt down what your fantasies are allowing you to feel and whatever it is that you are trying to express, try to express it outwardly, even when you can’t pinpoint what exactly you even want to articulate. You probably won’t even succeed immediately but every attempt to redirect energy from inner to outer world is a beginning of something. As long as you feel that you are hiding a part of yourself, or that there is something unsaid, you are feeding MD.

Life without MD and what it is (not)

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If someone were to give you a pill that would cure MD, would you take it?

Would you end this?

You could call this a typical dilemma that eventually slaps every addict in the face and keeps them in maddening state of duality, yet this is such a sly question to ask oneself because you can’t answer it before answering another question first:

What is a ‘cure’ to you? What is your definition of life without MD?

Based on how you answer this one, the entire process of overcoming MD becomes preshaped in your head, paved with obstacles you expect to encounter, sacrifices you expect to make, side-effects you expect to suffer. If, to you, losing MD is like seeing all books burned is to a writer, will you be eager to overcome it? Of course not. If your idea of recovery is flawed, if your final destination is supposed to be a throne built on self-sacrifices, you will subconsciously do everything to never ever arrive there – even if you are consciously headed that way. Overcoming MD is a bit like intentionally walking into fire, and your instincts are programmed to make you hesitate.

But what if there’s no fire at all? What if it’s just our fear of fire and being burned that is holding us back?

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If fantasy is the stubborn art of holding on, letting go is its opposite. By letting go, it’s almost as if you are committing a metaphorical suicide, a sort of self mutilation, where you give up bits of yourself embedded in a daydream in return for something that is supposed to be freedom, hoping the world will someday make sense but never being convinced of it. A part of you is terrified of overcoming MD because to you, somewhere at some tucked away part of your mind, there is a hardwired, irrational belief that overcoming MD means losing yourself. And if recovery is only a compromise where you have to choose the lesser of two evils, where being free of MD means losing feelings or creativity or oneself altogether, you will instinctively sabotage all your conscious efforts centered on quitting – which is expected, and maybe, the most human thing to do after all. Reluctance to overcome MD is based on this very belief that one excludes and nullifies another – and yet, this happens to be a fallacy. Do you in your hearts of hearts really believe that in order for this to end you have to make such a bargain? If overcoming MD means losing what makes you human, would you settle for such a compromise and go as far as to call it a cure? Is that supposed to be freedom?

It may seem counterintuitive but, while overcoming MD does involve an immense, insane fear of letting go, it ultimately does not involve losing or giving anything up because there is nothing to give up in the first place. Everything was and will always be yours and the only problem all along was you not realizing this.

Fantasy is a canvas onto which you paint and project what was already inside you. When you lose fantasy, it is canvas you lose, not your creativity or the colors or your feelings. But without the canvas, without something through which your passion materializes and becomes (elusively) tangible, your true colors are never shown and your feelings never come alive – and right here you falsely come to believe that it is your passion and creativity that are gone. They are not – you are just missing a canvas to paint them onto. Without the canvas, they go inexpressible, indefinable and hidden from you. But they are still there.

The fleeting feelings that come with fantasy are like radio waves to your mind that is an antenna and a receiver, where signal is always there but without the antenna and the receiver, waves are never converted to music and in turn, music is never heard. Likewise, without MD, you only lose that temporal, fleeting access to your feelings but not the feelings themselves. How many times have you heard someone saying that they won’t give up MD because it would take away their imagination? The problem here is, MD does not make you more creative or imaginative, it does not make you a potential writer or give you any particular talents. If you are creative, you were always creative and MD was merely giving you a chance to express through fantasy what you always carried inside you and what could have been expressed in myriads of different ways had you been more confident of yourself. Your feelings, your imagination have always existed and will exist regardless of MD. But these traits and feelings all need a healthier platform than fantasy, a canvas through which they can be materialized and observed, through which they can be truly experienced: you – with a healthy sense of self, self that allows itself to experience entire spectrum of feelings, without diverting and changing them so that they hurt less. How can a daydreamer’s broken self that runs away from itself host feelings when it can’t even handle itself?

By overcoming MD, you are not overcoming imagination or fantasy but your addiction to it. Don’t be afraid. At the end of the day, the only thing you are letting go is a false sense of comfort and the urge to censor and always be in control of your feelings. Everything else is still there, awaiting for a healthier canvas, awaiting for you until it can manifest again in some other form. Surrender to the feelings as they really are and see where they take you.

Characters and Attachments

Daydreams are not so much about your fictional lovers or friends as about you. You are projecting what little is left of your hopes to the characters you dream of being emotionally involved with so when you lose them to reality, you are also losing the image of yourself where you have finally reached self-acceptance and that frail, fleeting sense of belonging. Fantasy is made of metaphors where your unconscious doesn’t always pick the most explicit ways to talk back to you but when it does speak, it is telling you something big and your daydream characters are its expressions. They are not randomly invented or picked up personas or identities, they are mirrors and personifications of unresolved issues that are bothering you, they are feelings that slip in and out of selves. Your feelings. That is why abandoning them feels as if your soul got torn off – because in a way, it did. It is specific emotions you crave to experience and, with characters being embodiments of those emotions, your craving automatically extends to characters and you are caught in a web of dangerous attachments. And if your insatiable attachment to characters originates from attachment to your own dissociated feelings, then you are virtually attached to something that was rightfully yours all along and you were elusively reclaiming it back through MD.

Most of us think of these characters, i.e. feelings as something separate from ourselves, something that came as a gift when we first plunged into MD, and consequently, something that will have to be taken away from us once we let go of MD – and it is from this construct that the pain and unhealthy attachments originate – from never really recognizing that they were always supposed to be yours. This is the crux of dissociation after all: inability to recognize parts of yourself as your own, falling for your own illusion of separation over and over again. You mistake the part for the whole and then wonder why you feel so incomplete.

Analyze your fantasies and characters and when you think about them, think in terms of feelings. If one daydreams about being a singer, it’s not the role of a singer that one craves and that creates the high – it’s the feelings that come with it, the confidence, the effortless flow of emotions. People don’t get addicted to drugs. They get addicted to feelings that drugs trigger in them. When one gets addicted to benzodiazepines, it’s the feeling of calm and spontaneity and absence of anxiety that is the main catalyst for both creating and reinforcing addiction, not the chemical formula of the drug. It’s the feeling of calm that one is always returning to, not the drug itself. Same goes for you. While the narrative content of your fantasies does give you incredibly important cues on where your issues lie, it is not being a hero or having the adventure of your life that you want – it is the feelings these situations and scenarios awake in you.

Fantasy is a bit of a non-self state. Just like in dreams, identities get muddled, you change forms and selves, you experience emotions through other people and it becomes hard to tell where you begin and where others end. And yet, all your characters are you in a way – they are vessels into which you incarnate bits of yourself and pretend they are someone else, they are personifications that go beyond the self and identities, they are manifestations of your ability to receive and give love, of your spontaneous self, free from inhibitions and anxieties of your current self. Even if you daydream about real people, there is no reality other than that inside your heart and everything else is just a projection canvas for it, even other people.

No other drug or addiction will give you as much information about what is going on beneath the surface as fantasy. For example, in third-person fantasies involving love between two characters, sometimes, love is just love and sometimes, romance has absolutely nothing to do with romance and the two characters can represent two conflicting views or beliefs that the mind is unconsciously trying to consolidate. Every character in your fantasy is there for a reason. They are riddles to be cracked and translated to a feeling that needs to be dealt with, which eventually makes the attachment to that particular character or fantasy resolve on its own and takes away the feeling of duality.

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It took me a lot of pain over the past few years, a lot of internal struggles to be able to write what I just wrote. I don’t even know if these conclusions make sense to someone who hasn’t felt at least once that they have the right to the feelings experienced in fantasy. It’s a tough road ahead, probably with more failures than victories, but if you focus on strengthening your sense of self, there is a point where duality slowly starts breaking and feelings from fantasy start to bleed in the real self. It is in daydreamer’s nature to engage in a dangerous self-negation, becoming lesser so that fantasy can become greater because to us, for one to become stronger, the other indispensably has to become weaker. And so you learn to toss yourself aside, convinced that you can only have one at a time, never quite knowing that this split is reconcilable.

Part V: Was it all just a lie?

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“My real self wanders elsewhere, far away,
wanders on and on invisibly and has nothing to do with my life.”
– H. Hesse

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Mechanisms driving fantasy addiction break down with recognition of absence, with poignant realization that your characters are not here, that they have never been here and never existed, that they were never yours. You’re alone, and your most ardent passion, your trump card, that one thing that dissipates meaninglessness and takes away the feeling of crippling loneliness is a lie, just a self-crafted lie to stifle your existential turmoil.

Is it? Was it really that cheap in the end?

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You don’t need me to tell you that, sometimes, maybe even most of the times, it takes looking oneself in the mirror and realizing that, god, we really are cracked and some of our daydreams are indeed just that, silly distractions and compensations to feed our messed up ego and get us out of the mud because we are too scared to try and step out on our own. Yet, this is just one tiny aspect of your defense mechanism that happens to be serve one far more important purpose.

What we call MD is not fundamentally wrong.

Before you decide that your levels of fucked up are so high or bizarre that they don’t fit any diagnostic criteria, remember that those cravings driving your MD, they are cravings for life. Life that was denied to you. And there is nothing wrong with that, there is nothing wrong with protesting against the dullness of existing. This is what the most substantial aspect of MD is, this is what MD itself is: your way of frantically holding onto that one reminder that you too can feel alive, in strange and deviant ways, but it’s still your most honest attempt to live. Is it maladaptive? Yes, sometimes terribly so. But still, you are trying to live your life the only way you know it and there is no need to feel guilty over a habit that is merely a manifestation of your insatiable instinct to survive. If you’re in deep, fantasy is where all your feelings escaped to, it’s where you escaped to and metamorphosed into microcosms of intricate storylines and characters, so that your own emptiness cannot recognize you when it comes looking out for you. It’s a game of hide and seek, where you are both hunter and the hunted – but you have forgotten where to search, you have forgotten where you hid yourself.

MD is an extension of you. It is you to the very core of your being. It is the feelings you never got to express, words you never said, beliefs you never defended, traits you never nurtured enough. But these phenomena, they exist as latent possibilities somewhere deep within your mind, they exist as seeds that were left forgotten and never got to flower. But they are not gone, they still can be sensed faintly somewhere on the other side of consciousness. If you are cold, it means you instinctively know the meaning of warmth, even if you have never felt it. That burning love some of you have for your dreamworlds, for your characters, “made up” love also had to come out from somewhere. You didn’t invent it, you didn’t fabricate it. It came from depths of your subconscious that craves and knows how to feel love. If you know how to love fantasy, then you have the ability to love reality too because this war is not about fantasies and realities – it is about you and your ability to love. As I explained in III part: overcoming addiction to fantasy does not mean finally learning to love reality – it means rediscovering that self you sent into exile. The only reason one can madly love fantasy, while remaining indifferent to reality, is because to love fantasy, you don’t need a self. You merely exist as an awareness without identity, a selfless observer who consumes and lives off their characters and idealized selves. But to love and interact with reality, you sure need a well-defined self because it is the receptor through which you perceive reality. Without this receptor, reality cannot and will never get to you. You know what reality is? It doesn’t exist. Reality is molded by feelings, made by feelings, born through its observers. It doesn’t exist without you observing it, without you feeling it.

You have forgotten yourself. You have forgotten in order to forget the discomfort that comes with it and by forgetting yourself, you have also forgotten reality. You’re held back by your own convictions that you are too different, too dysfunctional for this world. Living – what should come off as an instinct, like breathing, like blinking, for you occurs as a sophisticated skill that has to be practiced daily, with crippling bouts of tiredness at each pretense to be alive. Every day is a pretense, every fucking moment, pretense to smile, pretense that what your friend says gets to you, pretense to care, pretense to be alive. But this, too, is a defense mechanism that must be broken. Otherwise, you will always be standing on the sidelines, torn between watching other people living their lives and watching your characters living their lives. But where are you in all of this?

Life has to begin somewhere. Maybe it will not begin with rediscovering bliss, maybe it has to begin with pain, with surrender to all things repressed. Maybe you have to peel layers of yourself until you get to that place where things got blocked. Maybe you have to try to expose your dream self to the world, to someone other than you. Get things out of your system. Your beliefs, your feelings, your demons. You have to let someone other than you observe these feelings, directly or indirectly. I do not know how many false versions of yourself, defense mechanisms and fortified walls will have to fall for this to happen, but for your existence to be acknowledged, for it to bleed into reality, you have to try to reveal what was kept sealed. There is nothing more draining than waking up to the thought that no one can see the dream (real?) you, or touch you, hear you, witness the fires burning inside you, no one can warm up to those flames. There won’t be a single testament of what existed inside you when no one watched. Have you ever wondered, if fantasy is the only place where you feel genuinely alive, why are you so secretive about it? Seriously, what’s the point? Why do you hide the only thing that feels oddly right in a world where everything else seems wrong? Well, of course. You try to live out your daydreams, become the better version of yourself, you direct that energy to the real world, and what happens? The energy hits a wall and never reaches real world, leaving you forever estranged. Feelings you want to express are ideally supposed to flow naturally from your fantasies to your real self, but as soon as they reach your real self (that is, as soon as you try to express them in reality), everything backfires because your state of self is so broken and fragile that it cannot host these emotion, which is what prevents their expression.

To communicate your daydream feelings with the outside world, there has to be a bridge between your own world and the outside world through which these feelings can flow and this bridge is the self. Without it, those two worlds cannot communicate and this is where the split occurs, this is precisely where MD cuts you in two. There is absolutely nothing wrong with having a vivid inner life; writers, poets, artists, philosophers, they all have it, don’t they? But unlike us, people with healthy inner life are not split. Their worlds are communicating with each other, ours are not.

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Behind every daydream, there is a feeling.

It drives your plot, it molds your characters. It’s the mastermind behind it all. Every character, every single story is an embodiment of it. The entire narrative content of your specific daydream is driven by an emotion that you failed and continuously fail to express in real life – and as long as this particular emotion remains unexpressed in your real life, by your real self, the respective daydream which is driven by it will not stop.

Every daydream is a personified feeling, a throttled desire to feel something, not to possess. And these feelings, they are truer than anything else, they are bits of the puzzle missing from your real self. The stories you weave in your head are an attempt to salvage bits of yourself, gone a bit wrong, but still, they were born out of your desire to live, out of your desire to change things. It is your primal hunger for life, for emotional or intellectual stimulation, for connection, fulfillment, meaning, passion. The silliest thing you can do to yourself is ignore the hunger and pretend you can live without it. You can’t. You shouldn’t. Instead of obsessing how to ignore the hunger, why not try to find some food for your soul?

But before you can find the food, find your mouth first.

Part IV: The Void

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Wake butterfly –
it’s late, we’ve miles
to go together.
– Bashō

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Whether you decide to wean yourself off gradually or go cold turkey, physical cessation of engaging in MD is a prerequisite for stopping it. Force yourself to stop daydreaming for a certain period of time – not in order to stop MD altogether – but in order to release and identify underlying toxic emotions and pain that fantasy is censoring. You will be surprised what will come out. As already explained in the first part of this series, once you have familiarized yourself with the pain, loneliness, fears and once you have surrendered to them and gradually accepted them, you should lose the impulse to use MD as an escape method.

Now, a question: is MD an attempt to run away from yourself or an attempt to finally reach yourself?

I say both. If you embrace negative feelings and face them, that should stop you from using MD for escape purposes. However, you will still want to use fantasy to temporarily come in touch with detached feelings and parts of yourself. Now let’s see what we can do about this part.

The Void

When you finally decide that you are going to try to put an end to this madness, one thing usually stands in your way: emotional bluntness. Inability to connect to yourself and consequently to the real world. Probably the most discouraging feeling in the entire recovery that drives all your relapses.

When you think about it, it’s not bad feelings that torture and compel you to engage in daydreaming as much as it’s the lack of feelings. But what causes this numbness?

Detachment isn’t a product of what we call MD. Numbness was already there – and MD was your way of dealing with it. You wound up numb and emotionally disconnected from reality because you became emotionally disconnected from yourself and MD was merely a response to this. Do you notice that the moment you switch the point of view from yourself to your daydream characters [or idealized you] and use them as receptors instead, you can instantly feel? Or rather, they can feel and you can feel through them. In other words, you are physiologically able to feel. Which brings us to conclusion that you are not an emotionless nutcase or somebody who is beyond repair. You can feel but dissociation stands in your way.

There is an ongoing misconception that maladaptive daydreamers are at disadvantage because our drug of choice is accessible all the time making it perpetually tempting and harder for us to stop while alcohol or meth addicts have to go through some bother to get hands on theirs. Well, not really. We are not special because we are maladaptive daydreamers and we aren’t having it any more difficult than other people dealing with addictions. All addictions involve fantasy. All of them. When a meth addict isn’t taking meth, he’s thinking about it all the time. It’s the first thought that flashes through his mind when he wakes up and the last thought that leaves him before he falls asleep. A daydreamer is not the only one who is stuck in a fantasy world non-stop. All addicts are. We are collectively cut off from the outside world, we are all a bit numb and a bit lost in this ocean of alienation.

Emotional bluntness follows all addictions as their elemental driving force. Numbness, coldness, detachment, inability to connect – these things aren’t specific to just you. Whoever had addiction also struggled with partial or complete lack of emotional response relative to the real world. People addicted to pornography usually cannot experience intimate or sexual feelings with a real person yet, hey, it’s sex they crave. A daydreamer who craves connection to something but cannot connect to anything isn’t any different.

Breaking through the numbness is a slow process. When reality slaps you in the face and your dreamworld crumbles, this does not equal instant recovery – this person who will wake up will still not be you. The numbness you feel upon stopping MD, detachment, loneliness, alienation and cold reality everyone seems to love but you hate – these are not you, they are not your ultimate destination. It it just an ugly, long, sometimes discouragingly long transition between waking up from a dream and actually awakening to reality.

Breaking Through the Numbness

Technically, you can be aware of every single problem of yours but until life slaps you and robs you of comfort zones, you will not start to deal with MD. Many of us need to be challenged and pushed to the edge of our limits in order to start doing things about our lives, just like a smoker needs to hear that his lungs are ravaged before desire for change can be born. You need a specific situation, something, someone who will wake you up, who will tell you in your face that you’re a fucking insecure coward who runs away and is inept to live. I mean, sure, I know I’m a coward, my depression makes sure to remind me of it every day, but when someone else tells you this, it hits you in quite a different way. It hurts. On a very, very deep intimate level. Then you start to get angry – with that person and with yourself. You finally start to process emotionally what you have done with your life, you come in touch with pain that has been hurting you for far too long and you slowly come to your senses. Then you start doing something about it. The main drawback is that we always deal with pain alone. That is not going to work. You can’t do it alone. You need an observer, something or someone external, you need to be challenged, outright pissed off to start making changes.

Get angry. With your therapist who doesn’t understand, with your family that undermines your problems. With the world, with yourself, with reality. Not frustrated but angry. Acknowledge the anger, acknowledge the helplessness and let them wash you clean.

Metaphorically speaking, you are stuck in a body that isn’t yours. I’m not referring to your daydream characters here. I referring to your real self, the one you see in the mirror and think of as foreign and miserable, the same one that is plagued with depression, self-contempt or low self-esteem, which make your self-image completely distorted. Heck, of course you will want to run away and escape from this decaying body, this broken self, because this isn’t you, this can’t be real you – otherwise you would have never wanted to escape from it in the first place. Your mind knows this, hence the impulse for running away. Your MD isn’t a protest against reality, it’s a protest against this broken, distorted self – that is NOT you as you should have been.

Lastly, get angry with this messed up version of yourself, with numbness and dissociation and void. And whenever someone tells you that you messed up your life and irrevocably wasted it, whenever they mention all the things you could have done but didn’t, your seeming lack of passion or interest in real life, get angry with them too because no one knows that every day is a struggle for you, because no one knows what it’s like to not to exist anywhere. Get angry because none of this is your fault. Because you didn’t choose to be like this.

Then start to change things. For somebody who has bottled things up their whole life, anger is an immensely healthy and purifying emotion. Destructive but purifying. It’s the fight component of fight or flight mode that makes one face uncomfortable situations and fears head-on, without running away from them or feeling intimidated. Anger will probably be the first emotion to awake in you relative to the real world. Welcome it and hate everything around you if you want to. Hate the real world if you need to. But hate it with passion. Just don’t be numb to it.

This is where bluntness breaks down and you begin. Seek situations that make you care about something other than your fantasy even for just 10 seconds, whether it’s destructive or warm and beautiful. Try to pinpoint these short, fleeting moments when you feel spontaneity of emotions, when real you awakens – and then hold onto them. In the beginning they are short, followed by a week or two or three of numbness and emptiness, but once they happen, let them be your hope, a reminder that things can be normal. When numbness strikes again, and it will, don’t ask yourself what you are doing wrong. Because you are doing nothing wrong. It’s normal – you simply have to be persistent even when the weight of the void keeps pressing down on you, you have to keep going. Every time you feel like you’re falling and failing, let pain defeat you over and over again and maybe this insane battle will make you feel alive every time you hit rock bottom. It sounds odd but pain, even tough it’s terrifying, reminds you that you’re alive. It pushes you to the limits. MD numbs pain and so it numbs the feeling of being alive. Your dream self may be alive but you aren’t as long as you rely on MD not to fall apart.

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You know what the worst thing you can do to yourself is?

Convince yourself that you really are without passion and incapable of feeling emotions you experience in your daydreams. If in the midst of your withdrawal you think to yourself that you will never be the person you are in your fantasies, you are automatically self-sabotaging. Don’t think of reality as something foreign you have never experienced before that everyone suddenly expects you to come to love after years of being absent. Reality is where your feelings are – feelings shape our perception of it to the point one could even argue that there is no objective reality. You exist where your feelings are. All your feelings are in your fantasies right now, but once you transfer them not from your daydream characters to reality, but from your daydream characters to yourself, you will automatically start to connect to reality.

MD is not a split between worlds – it’s the split of the self. You can fuse the worlds together but the emptiness remains because the one who observes these worlds is broken in two. Don’t obsess over trying to stop daydreaming. Don’t obsess over trying to love reality. You’ll fail. Focus on healing the self and cravings will reduce automatically. Your goal number one is to make yourself feel without censorship all the things your daydream characters feel. When you succeed this, you win.

Relapse?

When you finally start to get better and receive positive feedback from reality, you’ll relapse. It’s the ridiculous law of addiction and you can do little to avoid it.

You aren’t a heavy smoker who can just give up tobacco and then find another distraction. MD often bleeds into every possible aspect of your life so when you do away with fantasy, you automatically do away with your entire life, leaving yourself with nothing. There is no one, no home, no reality to return to. If your recovery is going well, you will have more and more moments when you briefly come in touch with your true self [and therefore with reality too], but majority of your days will still be tainted with numbness.

If at this point you really relapse [and chances are very, very high], oh well. It’s actually perfectly normal. Do not spend a moment beating yourself up over it. Cravings will exist as long as dissociation exists. MD is your life force, it’s the energy that cries out to be released one way or another – and you can neither stop it nor ignore it. As I said in the beginning, stopping daydreaming is necessary only in order to let repressed issues out and then feel them with your entire being, which will ultimately liberate you from their toxic grip. If you relapse after you have done your emotional detoxification, it’s okay. From this point onwards, all you need to do is focus on breaking dissociation and healing yourself. If you daydream in the meantime to give yourself a little fix to pull you through the periods of nothingness, make sure you don’t use MD to repress things and don’t let it distract you. Always use it with the idea that things you feel in daydreams can be felt in real life too, that things your characters feel were originally supposed to be yours. The more you come in touch with yourself, the more will your addiction collapse. When you feed MD, you starve yourself – but when you feed yourself, you starve MD. Break the dissociation of the self and MD is gone.

Part III: Return to Reality

It’s strange and terrifying to think about return when you’ve been gone for so long. It’s strange because many of us ultimately don’t know where we should be returning to. Is it even a return? What are we leaving behind? If the dream world feels like home somewhere at the back of your mind, then is reality where you should really be?

It’s inherent for a dreamer to despise reality because it threatens the only place where you can exist and therefore your existence altogether. Saying reality can never measure up to the daydreams is understandable from your position, but it’s a very ambiguous statement, dangerously inaccurate too. You know that daydreams feel wonderful because you exist in them, you’ve seen it all, you’ve felt it, you’ve been there and you can attest to just how beautiful and emotionally fulfilling they can be, right? But when you say reality is terrible, are you actually there? No. Do you feel like you genuinely exist in it? No.

This is why you are wrong.

Reality can’t measure up to your daydreams only because you are not here. How can you say reality is ugly when your eyes are shut so you can’t even see it in full bloom? What gives you right to say it’s dull when you don’t even exist in it? Yes, reality can be just as exciting, just as thrilling and mind-blowing and emotionally fulfilling as your daydreams. Don’t use the excuse that it will never compare to the life inside your head. It’s your perception that’s flawed, not the world. Every time you stop daydreaming and try shifting your focus from fantasies to the outer world, you come to a conclusion that not only reality happens to be dull and disappointing for you but outright suffocating. This happens because your entire system is depressed. And thoughts of depressed people are always turned inwards, preventing them to be here, to live in the moment, regardless of how intensely hard they attempt to shift their focus. If you aren’t turning your attention inwards to daydream, you’re turning it inwards to ruminate about how fucked up and miserable everything is. As long as your thoughts are turned inwards, you’re not here. And as long as you’re not here, reality will continue to be terrible for you.

Do you know why you daydream? Because you desperately try to exist somewhere, anywhere, as long as you can exist. Because when you aren’t daydreaming, you are nowhere. And this nowhere you call cruel reality, which you’re catapulted into every time you abandon daydreams, isn’t reality. It’s nowhere. Don’t mistake things.

Returning to reality means returning to yourself.

It doesn’t mean giving up what’s in your daydreams and it doesn’t mean forcing yourself to focus on the outside world and pretend you are what you’re not. It means rebuilding your sense of self until it’s solid enough for you to exist inside your own body instead of existing in dream world and nowhere at once. It means rebuilding the sensors which let you experience positive emotions on your own skin in place of having to depend on and live off emotions of your characters. This new self that will be reborn and that you’ll ultimately be returning to as you return to reality is made up of the same self that expresses itself in your daydreams which means that by giving up daydreaming, you’re only giving up the habit that consumes countless hours, nothing else. As I wrote in the previous post, those feelings of life making sense, of purpose and love and passion and spontaneity of emotions experienced in daydreams, they’ll remain yours. This is the thought you have to remember during your entire recovery. You’re not giving anything up. Your most precious daydreams are you.

There is no such thing as finding a balance between fantasies and reality because if you do so, you will always be split, moving from one place to another and never dedicating yourself wholly to either side. And this is not fair. It’s not fair towards people in your real life and it’s not fair towards yourself. You have to go for all or nothing. When you do go for all or nothing, you can have both. When you genuinely let go of your attachments and daydreams in order to experience and process underlying pain that must be felt for you to stand up and rebuild yourself, they’ll come back to you.

Part II: Things you are and things you are not

You’ve probably heard that it’s surprisingly common for some people to have rape fantasies. Does it mean that those people are really attracted to it in real life and that they feel like acting it out? Hell no. Introduce this thought to them in real life and they will most likely be very disturbed.

That’s fantasy for you. Far-fetched scenarios and events that you think you want but you actually don’t. Majority of those people fortunately know that their fantasies are just fantasies whereas maladaptive daydreamers think that events in their daydreams are mirroring their real needs and that they cannot be happy unless they came true. This is the first misconception that you’ve possibly imposed on yourself. Ask yourself: what is it that you really want? Break down your daydreams to pieces and analyze them bit by bit. Is it people from your daydreams? Events? Adventures? Is it feelings you experience there? If one by one came true and appeared in your real life, which one would finally satisfy your needs?

There are many types of fantasies just as there are many different reasons for their existence. Some are superficial wishful thinking while others contain very precious salvaged parts of you, so to discard MD as a cowardly attempt to rewrite things that didn’t go the way you planned is an oversimplification. MD is how you would like things to be but it’s also how things would have been hadn’t you fallen somewhere along the way.

Narcissistic daydreams centering on idealized self, success, power, intelligence and need for attention serve to delude and distract you from the fact that you can’t deal with your own weaknesses. Nothing deep here. They are superficial and have no other purpose than to get your wounds licked. You already know that having narcissistic fantasies doesn’t mean you’re a narcissistic ego maniac with control issues – it means you’re insecure. Work on these insecurities in real life, do things without being held back by your own and other people’s expectations and daydreams like this vanish. Don’t try to fix yourself by force. Trying to mimic your daydream characters by doing things they do will only give you a false sense of security and further hold you back. You sincerely have to accept and acknowledge your own flaws, you have to accept yourself as fucked up as you are and then start dealing with insecurities and flaws one by one, correcting them when possible, accepting when not. Same goes for need for attention; it means there are so many things you would like to communicate yet somehow always end up being silent. For every word you wanted to say but chose not to because you were doubtful of yourself, the energy builds up, feeding your daydreams and starving your soul. Speak up, don’t bottle things up. If you want to shout at the world that you hate it, then shout and make sure you are heard. Until this urge is satisfied in reality, a part of you will always want to wallow in self-soothing daydreams and no medication or trigger avoidance will stop this. You will be surprised how easy these fantasies are to break once you have dealt with insecurities. When you sort yourself out, you will find yourself reaching the level of confidence of the idealized you. While you may never be in control of real life like in your daydreams, you can be fully in control of yourself. And that’s enough for happiness.

If issues that lie beneath and feed your MD are more severe, chances are that you are broken to the point of feeling like you have no personality and exist nowhere, robotically observing life without participating in it.

MD begins where self breaks. Something had to butcher your sense of self so hard for MD to take over your life. Your daydream characters are your last attempt to latch yourself onto something concrete before you completely disappear. You are extending your existence through them in ways sometimes unclear even to you, you live off them. It’s as if you severed a part of yourself, dissociated it completely from your own identity so that not even you can recognize it and transferred it to daydream characters because that is the only place where it can continue to survive when you no longer can and when everything else is falling apart. It’s pretty parasitic way of living but it is doing an excellent job of keeping you alive.

Selflessness. That is why it’s so easy for you to become other people – i.e. daydream characters. You take form of whatever pours into you because there is no solid sense of self that would make your identity firm and separate you from them. This holds particularly true for daydreamers who fantasize about fictional characters from books or TV shows without ever involving themselves. It may feel like you aren’t involved at all but one of those characters usually has something very personal to you which allows you to merge your identity with theirs. Maybe, if the things hadn’t gone wrong, you would have been very similar to them. Maybe, you are attracted to something they have that was supposed to be but somehow didn’t end up yours. And you want it back, that’s why you are so drawn to them. Because you perceive your identity as flawed, you abandon it and conflate with one of those characters without ever even noticing. Because if you noticed, it’d backfire, you’d be aware of yourself, the very same self that you despise and try desperately to keep out of the way. If you can only fantasize about romance in third person, using two characters without involving yourself, this signals that you are failing to connect the feeling of love to your own identity, so you eventually end up transferring it to your characters and experiencing it through them. This level of dissociation speaks volumes on how much your sense of self is actually broken. But if you can feel love through your characters, then you are capable of feeling love of identical intensity in real life even though you may have convinced yourself otherwise. It’s not emotions that are foreign to you, it’s you who are foreign to yourself. How can you connect emotionally to other people when you can’t even connect to yourself?

Fantasies like this are oftentimes extremely profound and don’t revolve around superficial urges such as need for attention and narcissistic desires – instead, they are more existential in nature, usually relative to deeper issues like loneliness, love and wanting someone to acknowledge your existence and they’re not something to be disposed of. You usually engage in these types of daydreams in order to come in touch with these detached parts of yourself that have been shunned in real life for so long that you even forgot they existed. That spontaneous person you’re in your daydreams isn’t a lie. That could be you. That would have been you had you properly developed.

I’ll repeat what I said in previous post. You aren’t running away from reality, you’re running away from yourself. But is this self you are fleeing from really you?

No.

It’s not even a self. It’s a blend of negative emotions that permeate your existence and deceive you into believing you are what you are not. It’s a void where you don’t get to exist. One part of your real self is missing, asleep, dead, you name it, and it will be asleep as long as depression messes with you. The other part is stuck somewhere in daydreams and only chooses to express itself there. Give them up and you will be giving up yourself. This is why abandoning dream world hurts as if somebody tore your heart in two. You wouldn’t be giving up just your false comfort but also a part of your own soul, which tells you that simply abandoning feelings of the dream world by ignoring them isn’t correct either.

Part I: Fall of the self

Do you think the vague feeling of being split in two and existing between two worlds but belonging to none is exclusive to maladaptive daydreamers?

“If you try to have a conversation with me, I can’t bring myself to listen to you. I pretend to listen and you really think I do but my mind is somewhere else, thinking about it. Every time I try to stop doing it, I genuinely feel as if a part of me has been torn off and a deep sense of personal loss ensues. I feel as if I’m not here but I’m not there either and I can’t shake off this feeling of being split in two.”

This is what a recovering heroin addict once told me. Heroin addict. But it’s also what a regular maladaptive daydreamer could have told you, isn’t it?

Maladaptive daydreaming is, among other things, a typical psychological addiction. Most of the negative issues associated with maladaptive daydreaming come from the fact that it is an addictive coping mechanism and not some unique disorder with specific symptoms just recently discovered. You have heard million times that addictions are encoded in the primitive part of the brain associated with survival – which means that if you don’t get your fix right now, you feel more dead than alive and you need your drug of choice to bring you back to life. Your brain is sending a false message to you – it is issuing an urge that is blown out of proportion, compelling you to constantly indulge in daydreams and making you think that if you don’t, the world will end and you will lose a part of yourself. Drugs usually invade your sense of self – they fuse with it and by giving up the drug, you feel as though you are giving up a dear part of yourself.

Addiction is addiction but different types of drugs and addictive behaviors tell you different things about their users. So what does fantasy reveal about you? MD is like a guardian angel that tries to protect you too much and eventually causes more harm than good. But it’s still your guardian angel that tried lifting a burden off your brittle shoulders. It’s destructive in its own way but it was originally born to protect you from something. To realize and accept what you are trying to run away from is your first step towards recovery. Maybe it’s depression, maybe it’s low self-esteem and loneliness or it’s anxiety or PTSD.

Fall of the self

Maladaptive daydreaming isn’t the act of random mind-wandering – it’s a highly immersive mental activity, where all attention is gathered and directed towards happenings of the fantasy. This would be parallel to a so-called flow state, which is characterized by immersing intensely in an activity to the point of losing the sense of self. Which means, whatever happens in fantasy, happens, but not to you. It is a selfless experience, never integrated into what you call yourself, into sense of identity, into what makes you you. It exists as a detached, ecstatic, fleeting moment that slips through the fingers the moment you try to make sense out of it and process it as your own experience. You witness traces of happiness but the happiness is never yours.

Fantasy is an egoless state of mind where we are not ourselves. And by temporarily cutting ties from your own ego, the conscious identity, you’re also cutting ties from all insecurities you have ever had, from all the problems that are currently bothering you and this is why daydreams feel so damn good. Everything bad is just cut off from your perception. The part of your brain that defines your sense of self, along with all the negative things and mental illnesses attached to it, is turned off.

As you venture into this egoless place that is MD, you make up imaginary people you sometimes end up loving dearly or even fall in love with or you conjure imaginary places you’re desperately drawn to, and then suddenly – you wake up from your dream and you’re violently pulled back to reality and to being yourself. And this is where the problem arises: all those things you’ve done in your dreamworld and all those made up people you’ve come to love have nothing – absolutely nothing – to do with real YOU. They are not attached to your conscious sense of self. All those dreams and false memories you made – you made them in an egoless state of mind. And it’s this that makes you feel split. It’s not the fact that you’re physically apart from the content of your fantasies. It is the fact that your subconscious feelings, fantasies and desires do not connect to your sense of self. Even if everything you’ve been daydreaming about came true, you’d still feel like garbage, empty and miserable. If your imaginary friend came to life to make you less lonely, you’d still be lonely – because MD isn’t about made up friends or lovers or getting a new life. It’s about you not wanting to be you. Everything else is irrelevant.

In other words, you’re not addicted to your fictional characters or your imaginary love or to a fantasy about being a famous singer or writer. You’re addicted to not being you. You’re addicted to this erratic state of consciousness that is MD – regardless of its content – that provides a temporal relief.

I’m not saying that you don’t genuinely care about the content of your daydreams (quite the opposite, more on that soon) – what I am saying is that it’s not your love towards whatever is the content of your fantasies that creates this ugly feeling of being split between two worlds. One thing I can assure you (and this comes from my own experience) is that the moment you feel comfortable being you, those two worlds will reconcile, they will merge into one, and you’ll finally feel at peace with yourself.

Will a part of you be taken away as you give up your daydreams?

Maybe the saddest question I have ever asked myself was ‘how much of myself will I lose when I give up the only thing that makes me happy?’ Here’s a glimmer of hope: you’re not supposed to give them up. To give up the feelings you experience in your daydreams is self-mutilation. As strange or silly as they are, they still represent a censored part of your subconscious; maybe they are an epitome of your loneliness or your sadness. They are a testament to how hard you’re struggling and how hard you’re trying not to be dead – and to give this up is a crime towards yourself. Maladaptive Daydreaming isn’t just about wishful thinking and getting your wounds licked. It is that one place where your life flame still burns while you may be dead in all other planes of existence. That’s enough to know that this MD thing isn’t all that entirely wrong. Maybe your real life is all emptiness and void but what you do in your daydreams – you do it with passion. And that’s enough to know that you are still capable of loving and caring about something just like other people. So passion exists and don’t you dare ever doubt that. It exists in a wrong place but it exists nonetheless. What you have to do is find a way to redirect those emotions from daydreams to reality and, as stated before, this causally happens once you’re finally you. All the positive emotions from your daydreams will flow back into you and you’ll feel as though these two worlds between which you have lived for so long have at last coalesced into one.

So what you want to do is focus on healing the self. It’s a tough one but there’s no quick fix here. Now comes the irony which you’ve been waiting for: in order to heal yourself, you need to let go of your daydreams. But didn’t I just say that you aren’t supposed to give them up, you ask? Don’t give up the passion, don’t give up the love you have for the content of your daydreaming, don’t give up the feelings – because they are all, real or not, a reminder that you’re alive. What you do have to give up is the false sense of comfort your daydreams give you. Try giving up all those countless hours you spend stuck in your own head pacing back and forth because you’d rather be there than here. Try giving up the temporal fix when you feel miserable. If someone angers you, don’t impulsively lock yourself in your room and act out a revenge in your head; go kick a sofa or something, lash out at something external.

You have to wean yourself off of this strange dissociative painkiller that’s fantasy, then let yourself feel all the pain with every ounce of your being, let all the negative emotions resurface, let them swallow you alive, don’t resist, don’t run away, accept them, let them ravage you, and somewhere along this process, a part of the you will be reborn. Something will awake. Not all of you, maybe just a small part but that’s enough to gather what’s left of your strength and continue the struggle. If you feel the urge to daydream, this is okay – as long as it doesn’t censor the pain which you shouldn’t run away from anymore, it’s fine to give in and indulge for a while if you feel like you have to. Don’t ignore temptations, this sparks the fire of addiction even more. It’s a well known pattern: if you fight the urge to engage in an addictive behavior, it makes it stronger. If you acknowledge it, analyze it, this is what breaks the cycle of addiction. In other words, the imperative is not to block the pain and negative feelings. If a sudden sense of self-disgust or low self-esteem suddenly hits you, welcome it. Welcome it, analyze it, let it consume you, and you will realize it is just a false message your brain is sending to you because that’s what brains of depressed people do, after all. The more you let yourself feel and process the negative feelings without censorship, the more will the urge to daydream weaken and the less you will run away.

Who are you really?

Depression usually enters people’s lives like a tempest – yesterday you were an optimistic person enjoying simple pleasures of life and today you feel like a suicidal or apathetic piece of shit, and this is how it is for most people. Depression that underlies MD, however, takes a different route. It enters your life stealthily, slowly, so slowly you don’t even notice it, then it gradually robs you of emotions, ambitions, memories, motivation, identity, empathy, and you end up thinking: “I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t miserable,” or “these bad feelings must be a part of my personality, they have always been here“. Because of this, most of us fail to realize where depression (or anxiety or any other kind of chronic mental illness) ends and where we begin. So if this illness isn’t you, then who are you?

Let me make a digression here. MD is usually born when you can’t express yourself properly because you’re anxious, depressed or sometimes simply shy or lonely. Mental illnesses are like lenses which distort your perception. Everything you see appears more tragic, senseless or uglier than it really is. And your both eyes are infected with these lenses. But here your subconscious decides to play a trick on your mental illness and tells you: ‘well, if your both eyes are infected and make things appear worse than they really are, then why don’t you just close them?’ You do and this is the beginning of the addiction to fantasy. You stop paying attention to the outside world and you turn it inwards and use your mind’s eye to create things inside you: your daydreams. This mind’s eye, which is fantasy, cannot get infected with depression and this is why MD is a safe haven. Depression doesn’t reach there. What your subconscious forgets to tell you before it’s too late is that if you close those two eyes used for perceiving outer world, for things outside of yourself, you’ll be completely cut off from reality. But none of this is your fault – this is a war between mental illness, the attacker, and your subconscious, which is your protector, and you are their battlefield. You don’t have a single choice, they are the ones who decide – you only observe. So if you ever blamed yourself for being too weak to make a decision to cease this addiction, stop it. It’s wasn’t your fault.

Back to my question, who are you then?

The daydream version of you isn’t the true you but it’s not a fake one either. It’s a highly filtered product of your subconscious that tried to protect you. Then we have this other real-life you imbued with low self-esteem and negative thoughts that seem to go on a loop forever. Well, that’s certainly not your true self either. Heck, if it’s any comfort for you, the daydream you is far closer to the true you than this real-life depressed version of yourself will ever be.

Can you remember the time when you didn’t have MD? Can you remember your sense of identity when you were a child free of MD? Try conjuring up all those times when you knew how to live in the present. It doesn’t matter if you were 6 years old the last time you were here. Just try to pinpoint all those moments and try to remember the feeling of being in the now. Here’s one pretty handy trick you can use. I always joke that music is a drug that takes you on a trip down a memory lane. It’s like an emotional psychedelic. It transports you emotionally back in time, to another place, another reality, to wherever you wish. It helps people with Alzheimer’s remember who they are and regain a sense of identity for a short while. Maladaptive daydreamers often use music to help them imagine an alternate setting – but what if you used music to transport yourself to the past when you had neither depression nor anxiety or MD or whatever is bothering you? If you can remember a forgotten song which you used to listen as a child who at the time hadn’t had MD yet, listen to it again, try to remember who you were, and if the song is meaningful to you, the old you and your sense of self, which you used to have back then, will come back to you for those few minutes while the song plays. You’ll feel the warmth of finally being you. You won’t quite be in the present – you’ll be in the past, but it’s your real past, it’s your true self. Try to capture this feeling and then try to reenact it. It’ll strengthen your identity in the long run.

I’ll give another example on what set me free from my own MD for a short while. You all know what fight or flight mode is. What you also probably know is that most people with PTSD or chronic anxiety are stuck in a constant state of fight or flight. Spending too much time in this state eventually leads to a burnout and is a sure ticket to depression since you go from fight and flight into freeze mode where all your functions are off and you feel like an emotionless zombie. You don’t care, you don’t live, you don’t get angry or sad or happy, you only exist on autopilot. In order to feel normal and alive again, you usually need a fix so strong which will set your body back on fire. Someone or something has to attack you so fiercely in order for you to rethink your existence and regain your instincts and the will to fight back. This is what happened to me. When one of my daydreams violently crumbled some time ago, I got so ridiculously pissed off that for the first time after several years spent in freeze mode, I felt genuinely alive. I was me. The anger acted like a stimulant and the state lasted for 15 minutes until the anger wore off. But hell, during those 15 minutes, I was me. I was so mad but I was also indescribably happy. I could feel. I could let go. I was defeated but I also won. The thirst, the cravings, the split, this strange nostalgia for my daydreams all dissolved. But instead of just disappearing, every positive feeling that was limited to the daydream world only, such as sense of purpose, motivation and normal self-esteem, flew back into me. I didn’t lose a single part of me – quite the opposite – I regained back that detached part of my soul that existed only in daydreams. What took for me to awake was extreme anger, being defeated, my world crumbing to pieces. The moment I genuinely accepted that my dream world crushed, the moment I let go of all attachments holding me back for years, I was reborn. The anger, which is a natural stimulant, made something in me click. But note: this feeling of finally being alive and the desire to fight back woke up in me once my daydreams were in danger, not me. It’s because we’re so displaced, because fantasy is where we had hidden the core of our souls.

In the long run, you’re destroying neither the daydream you nor the positive feelings that come with it, you’re not giving anything up – you’re just transferring it to reality, to where it should be. But for this change to occur, before you can be reborn and whole again, you have to self-destruct, you have to let go.